News & Research

Sustainable Design in Six Minutes or Less

03/11/2011

Drew Beam plays Mr. Imagination in a series of sustainable design videos hosted by Dawn Danby and directed by Eric Smith.

“I have never met an engineer who willfully set out to damage
ecosystems,” says Dawn Danby00 ID,
sustainable design program manager for the international software company
Autodesk. “It’s sort of a bad way to make friends.” Instead, she finds that
“any skepticism we’ve run into” when promoting sustainable practices through
Autodesk – maker of AutoCAD and countless other tools for architects and
engineers – “simply reflects an outmoded idea: that to address the environment,
everything will cost a lot more and be a big hassle.”

In order to counter that mindset, Danby – who works out of the
company’s San Francisco offices – got together with Eric Smith94 GD, creative director at Free Range Studios, and
illustrator Drew Beam99 IL to
create a series of short videos on the basic principles of sustainable design
and engineering. The videos (available for free through the Autodesk Education
Community website) are both entertaining and practical.

As often happens when creative teams are brought together by
a third party, “We didn't know we were all RISD grads until the first day of
the shoot,” Danby says. But the three suspect that may have had something to do
with the fact that they quickly gelled into a tight working team, with Smith
directing the videos, Beam providing the illustrations that accompany the
narration and Danby providing creative direction while also overseeing the project.

In collaborating, they soon hit upon the formula of casting
Beam as “Mr. Imagination” – an embodiment of the creative process, who sketches
and deliberates behind the presenters (Danby and Jeremy Faludi, a sustainable
design expert and lecturer at Stanford) as they discuss, say, ways to make
products lighter without sacrificing performance, or designing objects for
long-term utility and relevance. The simultaneous sketching makes the
information supremely digestible by helping “the visual and verbal tracks of
the brain… to work together,” Danby notes.

Topics covered so far in the Sustainability Workshop video series include Design for Lifetime, an introduction focused on durability,
accommodating recycling and repair; Whole Systems Design, which looks at defining problems and assessing the environmental impact of products; and Lightweighting, coveringpractical tips such as
corrugating, hollow tubing and reinforcing that can reduce the mass of an object.

“Our videos are like mini-lectures that introduce concepts,”
Danby says, “so they don’t get into the technical details. But you learn how
to create greener products by doing it” – a lot like at RISD. With almost two million users
regularly taking advantage of the educational materials on the Autodesk
site – and increasingly more college campuses beginning to incorporate the video
series into their engineering and industrial design curricula – Danby and her
partners are excited to be helping designers to take a giant (green) step
forward.